In the last few decades, the education industry is evolving at an extended pace every year. Technology innovations are becoming a new norm for educational institutions as they are making learning easier for students, empowering staff with education tools, and enabling the administration to manage everything at their fingertips.
Microsoft for the education industry has helped educational organizations reimagine education with affordable solutions such as Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Power BL, Sharepoint, and others. As the back-to-school season is around the corner, educational organizations, students, and teachers are preparing for the upcoming academic year.
In this blog, we will discuss how Microsoft Dynamics 365- the cloud-based solution that consolidates CRM, ERP, and Office 365 in one platform for operations optimizations becomes a boon for the education industry. Let’s dive in!
How is Microsoft Dynamics 365 adding a new dimension to the education industry?
Microsoft Dynamics 365 brings a bunch of advantages to educational organizations in various ways.
A single view of data
Native Microsoft Dynamics 365 dashboards provide a centralized location to access and view students, staff, and other stakeholders’ data effortlessly. It provides a holistic view of every stakeholder’s data based on several metrics. The dashboard can be customized as per the educational institution’s needs.
For instance, the staff can get a complete view of the students such as attendance, accomplishments, assessment, extracurricular activities, and more, which lets them take informed decisions to better support students.
Enhanced team collaboration
The cloud-based Microsoft solutions for the education landscape eliminate the need to be inside the four walls of the organization to communicate. Especially, when different teams across departments need to connect and share data, things become difficult. The CRM keeps all the data in one place which allows staff to communicate anywhere, be it in the school or at home along with the facility of data updation in real-time.
Compliance with regulations
The education industry is a highly regulated industry where students and other critical data are stored and handled. Also, complying with data protection and other regulations is important. Microsoft Dynamic 365 provides a security model that ensures data remains safe. Plus, the two-factor authentication model safeguard login and other data from malware attacks. The security permissions setup around records takes the security up a notch.
Transaction management
Microsoft CRM seamlessly integrates with third-party systems thereby enabling invoices generation straight from the CRM system. When the finance team requires advanced solutions, third-party systems help with easy data access, and payment and bill tracking and management. This way fee payment journey is monitored entirely.
Student inquiries management
The educational organization needs to respond to students’ inquiries promptly, or else leads are difficult to push down to the conversion funnel. The situation is no different staff that can be satiated only when they are answered in the required time. Microsoft for education, resolve the situation by allocating the inquiries to the right person followed by auto-creation of activity regarding inquiry and related communications.
ď‚·Reduced administration activities
When the information is stored at a central location, a continuous back-and-forth among various applications and data storage is not required. For instance, when CRM is integrated with Microsoft Outlook, the stakeholders can send emails straight from the CRM without switching to Outlook. The saved time and effort are utilized in tracking leads and increasing conversion.
Increase acquisition and retention
Educational organizations are facing challenges with increasing admission and retention. Microsoft Dynamics 365 supports teams with simplified workflow and user interaction tracking, which, in turn, empowers the team to bolster relationships with students. The strengthened student relationship further helps in increasing admission and retention rates.
For instance, Microsoft education CRM helps in staying on top of the students’ applications which enables routing the application to the right person, accepting/rejecting the application, tracking applicants’ activities, reference management, and more.
Intelligent marketing
During student enrollment, the educational organization makes all the efforts to attract the right students and manages everything from admission to approval in between. In the competitive landscape, approaching the student in a modernized way is all-imperative. Presently, mobility and social media are powerful tools to step in with students’ expectations.
Mobile-optimized Dynamics 365 solution facilitates institutions with competitive intelligence to identify the gaps that become their strength, brand sentiment analysis to gain insights into what students and parents feel about the organization and campaign monitoring to measure the marketing campaign’s effectiveness.
Reporting and analytics
It’s impossible to make sense of data that’s scattered across multiple Excel sheets or disparate systems. At the same time, the administration demands staff to provide reports regarding performance progress and others, which eats up a lot of time and effort. That’s where Microsoft dynamic 365 comes to the rescue by automating the report generation process. The solution facilitates report creation for various aspects that in turn helps in gaining insights quickly.
The power of analytics is leveraged to empower students’ success by proactively identifying the challenges they face while dealing with academic data and the additional support they require. This step help in making students succeed. If you are a little unsure, Microsoft consulting service from a certified Microsoft partner helps you know how can you leverage this feature smartly.
Looking for Microsoft experts for your educational organization?
How AIMDek can help your educational organization innovate by leveraging Microsoft Dynamics 365?
Digital transformation in the education industry is not about digitizing the operations and processes; instead, it’s about completely reimagining learning with a laser focus on student lifecycle management. The administrators or leaders should check if they are taking full advantage of technology, does their staff has all the required tools to bring the best results, do enrollment efforts are capable of identifying potential students, whether are they seizing on all the opportunities, and much more.
Sadly, during the assessment, every organization finds themselves the institution is ill-equipped with technology that fails to elevate the institution’s performance. It requires a good solution and maestros of the field that can implement it rightly. Microsoft dynamic 365 solution covers every need of the educational institution with its range of features. At AIMDek, the certified team of Microsoft consultants helps academic hubs roll out digital Microsoft solutions aptly that meet their end-user needs.
If you are a university or college looking to enhance your student lifecycle with Microsoft dynamic 365 solutions, then identify your priorities, and connect with a reliable Microsoft consulting company that helps you choose the right module and customize it that best fits your campus needs.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
